Call the fire department when if your house is on fire? Or your cat stuck in a lil’ tree?

Check out books from a public library?

Get your license renewed at the DMV?

Basked in the glory of clean floors and empty trashcans at the statehouse?

Used a Pell Grant to help pay for your degree at Fiscal Idiot State?

Watch the busted water main in front of your house get fixed?

Frolick in your favorite city park?

Do you, or will you, get a social security check in the mail?

Benefit from one of hundreds of other city, state, and federal services?

Yeah.

Thought so.

So next time you whine about losing all your hard earned money to those pork-barrel feds, remember that it’s not actually your money. It’s money you owe. You are paying for a variety of services you use everyday and for some reason feel entitled to have without supporting them monetarily so that they can function. I’m not naive enough to suggest that you benefit from every federally or state funded program — you don’t. But for every program out there that you either don’t believe in or don’t make use of, there’s another person out there who makes no use of a program that serves you. It’s called being a citizen. It’s called contributing a the greater good — a greater good that serves you every day in one way or another.

What really amuses me is that it’s the same people who decry taxes to pay for every day services that call programs like health care and welfare entitlement programs. Meanwhile, they don’t want to pay to support the services they use every day. Now that’s entitlement.

Wowza! It’s been a while since my last post. I guess it’s because I’ve been frolicking on tropical islands. Sorry kids.

But here’s another Dear God it’s what Rachel Thinks!!!

I’ve been thinking about the idea of introducing the concept of homosexuality to kids, especially very young kids. Many argue that they are not ready to hear about homosexuality.

But there’s an important distinction that needs to be made, and that is between introducing the idea of homosexuality, and the idea of homosexual sex

The reality is that kids learn about about heterosexuality from day one. Mom and Dad. Adam and Sarah next door. They learn about the concept of men and women being partners, and they do so, until probably age 6 or so, without learning about heterosexual sex. So when they do learn about sex, it comes with a background of a lifetime of seeing societally-sanctioned relationships. The sex is coupled with the partnership.

Then kids learn about homosexuality. But what’s the first thing they learn? They don’t learn that Adam and Rob are partners, they learn that Adam and Rob as people who have sex. Think back to the first time you heard about homosexuality. Was it about a 20 year relationship, or was it about fucking?

Homosexuals are introduced to children not as people who are partners, but as people who have sex with each other. When it’s only about sex, and not about partnership and love, it can be contorted to be a sin, immoral, depraved, and wrong with much greater ease. After all, the bible only condemns homosexual sex (or it is argued that it does), not going out for coffee with some hot girl you like. And the concept is also contrary to what kids have grown up learning. New things are scary.

Now what if we did this.

What if instead of showing our kids how men and women can be partners, and later reveal that they have sex, we show them that men and women can be partners, men and men can be partners, and women and women can be partners, and later, when kids are ready to learn about any kind of sex, we reveal it across the board.

That way, when people first get their impressions of homosexuality, it’s not of some depraved sex act. It’s of a healthy partnership, just like the one they learned about seeing Mom and Dad. Then when sex gets introduced, homosexuals will perhaps not be seen solely as sexually deviants, but as just normal people, who, well, happen to have sex.